Before advances in modern communication, customers who sought to purchase goods or services had to travel to meet personally with vendors to place an order. Furthermore, if such orders could not be filled immediately, the customer may have been required to return to the vendor to receive the filled order.
The advent and advancement of the mail system, the telephone, and the internet, however, has made the process of order placement and receipt much more efficient. For example, the mail system and internet allows customers to become more easily aware of goods and services and make it easier to subsequently purchase them. More specifically, a potential customer might receive a catalog or other listing of goods and services from a vendor in the mail or over the internet and would then subsequently use the mail, telephone, or internet to place an order with the vendor. Although this increases efficiency of ordering, customers may still not have access to the most current prices, specials, and availability of the goods and services they want to order. Additionally, customers that require goods and services from multiple vendors must keep track of multiple catalogues or menus, which is highly cumbersome.
Along with increased efficiency due to catalogs and menus, the time it takes to place an order has become more efficient. Instead of having to speak personally with a vendor, the mail, telephone and internet allow orders to travel to vendors relatively quickly. Despite increased efficiency, however, these methods of placing orders are nonetheless deficient because they still require a long time to effectuate. Calling for goods and services is one of the most popular and fastest methods of ordering, but it is still slow and inefficient because the vendor may be busy or away from the telephone and unable to receive the telephone call. Moreover, the clarity of phone conversations can be poor, miscommunications commonly occur, and errors commonly occur when orders need to be written down by the vendor in addition to being orally dictated by the customer. Most importantly, customers who seek goods from multiple vendors are required to store, look-up and dial a multitude of telephone numbers and take the time to place each order, while also having to memorize or store multiple menus or catalogs of goods and services.
The internet solves some of these problems associated with the efficiency of placing orders, yet is still quite deficient. Although orders can be made quickly and with greater accuracy than telephone orders, a customer must nonetheless visit multiple internet sites to purchase goods or services, and not all vendors have internet ordering available. This is most true with the ordering of food and drinks, which is rarely available over the internet.
A customer who is on the go and requires goods and services quickly, such as food or drinks for example, will have difficulty handling all the information required to place an order at a specific location especially when the customer uses multiple communication means to place orders. One vendor may have multiple, physical locations along with multiple websites, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and cell phone numbers, which would require a potential customer to know all these numbers or addresses. When multiple vendors are involved, there can be hundreds of pieces of data that need to be managed, which can make ordering goods and services very difficult.
Finally, another problem with the current state of ordering is that efficiency does not always increase when a customer frequently places the same order or a small variety of orders. Here, the customer must nonetheless take the same amount of time place what might be the same order day after day. This is common for orders such for food or coffee, which are usually regular and repetitive in nature.
The present state of ordering goods and services lacks efficiency, especially for repetitive orders, when a customer utilizes multiple vendors or locations, and when a user needs to use multiple forms of communication. Therefore, what is needed are systems and methods for remote ordering.